The talk, titled “Energy-efficient Federated Transfer Learning for Privacy-Preserving Energy-Usage Forecasting,” will take place at the opening of the workshop, scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on May 27, 2026.
Read the abstract of the presentation:
Accurate forecasting of residential energy demand is
increasingly critical due to growing household electrification, renewable
integration, climate variability, and diverse consumption patterns.
Centralized forecasting models have privacy issues and limitations in
dynamic environments. This keynote introduces PEFEDTL, a personalized
federated transfer learning (FTL) framework for multivariate energy
forecasting in smart homes. It combines temporal convolutional networks
with a global attention module and cluster-based personalization. Many
other existing FTL approaches largely overlook device heterogeneity and
resource constraints, leading to suboptimal efficiency and limited
applicability in real-world edge environments. To address this gap, we
discuss possible approaches for energy-efficient FTL and present
Resource-Aware Federated Transfer Learning (RA-FTL), a framework that
adapts both model architecture and resource utilization to heterogeneous
client capabilities.
Bio – Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun
Head of the Communication and Distributed Systems (CDS) research group atthe Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, where he has been a
full professor since 1998. He got the Ph.D. degree from University of
Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1993. From 1994 to 1995, he was a guest scientist at
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France). From 1995 to 1997, he worked at the IBM
European Networking Centre Heidelberg (Germany) as a project leader and
senior consultant. He has been a vice president of the SWITCH (Swiss
Research and Education Network Provider) Foundation from 2011 to 2019. He has been a Director of the Institute of Computer Science at University of
Bern (INF) between 2007 and 2011, and from 2019 to 2021. Currently, he
serves as a Director of Studies at INF. He has been panel member of several
national research funding organizations such as Switzerland, Luxembourg,
Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. He has been supervising more than 40 PhD students, several of them with joint PhD supervision agreements with Unicamp and UFPA, Belem (Brazil).